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Paper short abstract:

This contribution investigates the relations between the ports of Piraeus and Trieste and their hinterlands to explore the heterogeneous and complex urbanities generated by Chinese and European infrastructure investments as they entangle the logistics and productive spaces of European peripheries.

Paper long abstract:

This contribution investigates how large-scale infrastructural projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative and the Next Generation EU, far from materializing in standardized and confined spaces, intertwine with local urbanization processes and long-established economic trends, in a way that is profoundly altering logistics and productive spaces of peripheral areas and secondary trade routes across Europe.

To this end, this contribution focuses on the infrastructural transformations and upgrades of the maritime routes along the Adriatic Sea, their gateways of Piraeus (Greece) to Trieste (Italy), and the complex interactions with their hinterlands Aspropyrgos and Trieste Province respectively. Two are the main focuses of this research. First, how Chinese investments in upgrading infrastructures are melting/competing with EU and local ones. Second, how these investments transform the hinterland of the two strongly different ports. For instance, since 2009, when COSCO Pacific took control of its operations in Piraeus, the port has expanded without any local infrastructural investments, giving space to informal activities and unregulated practices to spring up around new developments. Conversely, in Trieste the Chinese investments are improving the railway system in a complementary way to those of local governments and Next Generation EU. As a result, high-tech factories have settled to benefit from the new network. With their many differences, these two cases shed light on how Chinese infrastructure investments impact Europe's peripheral areas, the multiple actors, scales, and temporalities involved in these processes, and the heterogeneous spaces they generate.